Tuesday, December 29, 2015

Well, apparently I've written fewer posts on the blog this year than in any other year since I launched the Dreams Project. But I'm going to go ahead and say that's because this year's posts were bigger, longer, more detailed and more ambitious than ever before. So I'm especially happy to share my favourites from 2015. They cover everything from drunken Prime Ministers to bloody, fashion-driven wars,
from ghosts to dogs to pirates, plus plenty of baseball, too. Some of them are
among the most popular posts I wrote this year; others are just personal
faves.

The last couple of months have been especially quiet around these parts — but that's mostly because I've been caught up working on some exciting new ideas for 2016. Thanks so much to everyone who has read and shared and commented over the last twelve months. The next twelve should be a lot of fun.

So here we go!

Sir John A. Macdonald, Drunk and In Flames

It's one of the best-known facts in all of Canadian history: our first Prime Minister drank. Like, a lot.
Sir John A. Macdonald wasn't just a charming social drinker; he got the
kind of drunk where you find yourself puking on a chair at the Governor
General's residence. Or throwing up on stage during a public debate.
There were times when he went on benders that lasted for days, too drunk
to show up for his official duties. And on a winter night in London,
England — right in the middle of the final negotiations over
Confederation — it seems to have nearly cost him his life... [continue reading this post from January 5, 2015]

A Torontonian Historical Map of London, England

Toronto has a deeper connection to London, England than it does to
almost any other city in the world. After all, our entire country was
essentially ruled from this place for more than a hundred years. Some of
the most important moments in the history of our city happened
in this city, nearly six thousand kilometers away. As you walk through
the streets of Westminster, or Piccadilly, or Mayfair, you're likely to
pass dozens of hidden connections to the history of Toronto without ever
realizing they're there... [continue reading this post from January 21, 2015]

Marcel Duchamp & John Cage Play Magical Chess

On a cold winter's night in 1968, a phone rang in an apartment on
Spadina Road. The man who answered it was Lowell Cross, an American
student at the University of Toronto. He'd come north to write his
thesis on the history of electronic music, studying under Marshall
McLuhan among others. Soon, he would become known as "the inventor of
the laser light show," but he was already experimenting with new
technologies — combining electronic music with electronic visuals. One
of his multimedia projects had just been featured at Expo '67 in
Montreal. He was gaining quite a reputation. That's why his phone was
ringing. John Cage was calling... [continue reading this post from March 4, 2015]

A Tour of Toronto's Skyline in the Summer of 1930
The
summer of 1930. It was the beginning of a difficult decade for
Toronto, along with much of the rest of the world. The Great Depression
had just begun. But before the stock market crashed, the boom of the
1920s had fueled construction projects all over the city. Toronto was
full of elegant new landmarks — many of them still familiar to
Torontonians today: Union Station, The Royal York Hotel, Maple Leaf
Gardens, The Palais Royale, The Sunnyside Bathing Pavilion, The Princes'
Gates...
And on one July day, a photographer climbed to the top of a building on
the north-east corner of University & Dundas, pointed a camera
south, and took this photo of our city's new skyline. It's full of
interesting details, so I thought I'd give a brief "tour" of some of the
buildings you can see... [continue reading this post from March 17, 2015]

The Bloody Burlington Races & The War for Lake Ontario

They appeared out of the darkness, looming above the waves. Ten warships
sailing across Lake Ontario, far out in the water south of Toronto.
They were first spotted at dawn, as the black September night gave way
to the light of day, wooden hulls carving through the waves, sails
stretching high into the early morning sky. From each of the ships flew
the red, white and blue: fifteen stars and fifteen stripes. The American
fleet. This was 1813. Toronto was in the middle of a war zone. And it
was going to be a bloody day... [continue reading this post from March 31, 2015]

An Illustrated History of Baseball in Toronto

No one knows exactly when baseball was born. There's a bullshit story
about an American war hero, Abner Doubleday, inventing the game in the
1830s, but that's a lie. What we do know is that by the end of the 1850s, baseball had already arrived in Toronto. That's when the Globe wrote
about a local team practicing every Monday afternoon on the U of T
grounds. But back then, many Torontonians still sneered at the new sport
— they dismissed it as a sandlot game played by "undesirables." Cricket
and lacrosse were much more respectable. And they were much more
popular, too... [continue reading this post from April 13, 2015]

They say that on some dark nights, as an eerie mist creeps over the
Toronto islands, you can still hear him moaning somewhere in the
distance. On others, you might hear him walking up the steps of the old
lighthouse, even though there's no one there — or see a ghostly light
shining up top, even when the lantern isn't lit. Sometimes, you might
find his fresh blood spilled on those old wooden stairs. Or even catch a
glimpse of him yourself: a spectre stalking through the undergrowth, or
wandering the paths around the lighthouse, bloodied and beaten, his
arms missing. They say he's the ghost of Toronto's first lightkeeper and
that he's searching for the pieces of his body that were hacked off
more than two hundred years ago and buried somewhere in the sand... [continue reading this post from April 30, 2015]

Toronto's Founding Dog — And How He Almost Got Eaten
It was the summer of 1793. The summer our city was founded. On an early
Tuesday morning, as the late July sun rose above Lake Ontario, a British
warship sailed into Toronto Bay. She was the HMS Mississauga. She had sailed overnight from Niagara, arriving in darkness, waiting for dawn and a local fur trader
to show her the way through the treacherous shoals at the mouth of the
harbour. On board was the first Lieutenant Governor of Upper Canada:
John Graves Simcoe. His family was with him, too. The Simcoes had come
to found a new capital for the new province: a tiny muddy town that
would eventually grow into a booming metropolis of concrete and glass
filled with millions of people... [continue reading this post from May 27, 2015]

A Tour of Queen & Spadina A Hundred Years Ago

It has been nearly two hundred years since the intersection of Queen
& Spadina was born. When the two roads first met, Toronto still
wasn't even a city yet: it was the town of York, home to less than two
thousand people. Queen Street had been one of the very first roads the
British built when they got here, part of the original plans for Toronto
all the way back in 1793. They called it Lot Street back then, the
northern edge of the first few blocks built in the new town (right
around the St. Lawrence Market). A few decades later, it was renamed in
honour of Queen Victoria.

By then, Spadina had also been built. It was laid out as a wide avenue
by William Warren Baldwin, a doctor and lawyer who also designed Osgoode
Hall and would play a leading role in the political struggle for
Canadian democracy. He had just built a brand new house on his sprawling
country estate; it stood on the hill above Davenport: the original
Spadina House. Baldwin had the grand avenue carved out of the forest
south of his home in order to get a better view of the lake. The estate,
the house and the new road would all be given the same name: Spadina.
It's an Anglicized version of an Ojibwe word: "Ishpadinaa" ("a place on a
hill").

William Lyon Mackenzie ran for his life. His rebellion had failed. It
was a disaster. His rebel army was crushed on Yonge Street. His
headquarters at Montgomery's Tavern were burned to the ground north of
Eglinton. Some of his men were already dead. Others would soon be hanged
for treason. Just a few years earlier, Mackenzie had been the first
Mayor of Toronto. Now, he was the city's most wanted fugitive. The
Lieutenant Governor was offering a £1000 reward
for his capture. So Mackenzie was forced to flee the city he loved,
smuggled through the countryside by his supporters as gangs of angry
Loyalists searched for him. He ran all the way south to Niagara, getting
rowed across the river just a few minutes ahead of the men who had come
to arrest him. He was lucky to escape Canada with his life. He would
spend the next decade living in exile.

But Mackenzie wasn't ready to give up. Not yet. His failed rebellion in
Toronto was just the beginning. Now, he and his supporters would launch a
war against the British government in Canada, hoping a series of bloody
border raids would spark a full-scale democratic revolution. It would
last a year — for pretty much all of 1838. We call it the Patriot War.

This is a photo of horse shit. But it's not just any photo of horse shit. This horse shit is on Woodbury Common
— a beautiful patch of heathland in the English countryside. And with
horse shit on Woodbury Common, you can tell a story about the founder of
Toronto — John Graves Simcoe — and about a man who challenged him to a
duel over that dung.

1687. A year of war and famine on the shores of Lake Ontario. That
summer, on a night in early July, an army camped near the mouth of the
Rouge River, at the very eastern edge of what's now the city of Toronto.
A few thousand men — professional soldiers from France, militia from
Québecand their First Nations allies — feasted on venison before
bed. They were tired, finally heading home at the end of a bloody
campaign against the Seneca.

Their war was driven by a fashion trend. Far on the other side of the Atlantic, in the cobblestone capitals of Europe, hats made of beaver felt
were all the rage. The demand had already driven European beavers to
the brink of extinction. Now, the furriers turned to the Americas to
feed their ravenous sartorial appetite. The competition over the
slaughter of the large, aquatic rodents plunged the Great Lakes into
more than a century of bloodshed and violence. By the end of the 1600s, a
series of conflicts had been raging for decades on end. Thousands of
warriors fought bloody battles over control of the fur trade. They
called them the Beaver Wars.... [continue reading this post from December 16, 2015]

Monday, December 28, 2015

It was another fun year for the Toronto Dreams Project, rambling around the city leaving dreams in historical places, snapping photos with my phone as I went. And with just a few days left in 2015, I figured I would share some of my favourite shots from the year that was. My very favourite is probably the photo above: taken from Ward's Island in November. Below, you'll find twenty more — starting with the most Instragrammable new landmark in Toronto.

Wednesday, December 16, 2015

1687. A year of war and famine on the shores of Lake Ontario. That summer, on a night in early July, an army camped near the mouth of the Rouge River, at the very eastern edge of what's now the city of Toronto. A few thousand men — professional soldiers from France, militia from Québecand their First Nations allies — feasted on venison before bed. They were tired, finally heading home at the end of a bloody campaign against the Seneca.

Their war was driven by a fashion trend. Far on the other side of the Atlantic, in the cobblestone capitals of Europe, hats made of beaver felt were all the rage. The demand had already driven European beavers to the brink of extinction. Now, the furriers turned to the Americas to feed their ravenous sartorial appetite. The competition over the slaughter of the large, aquatic rodents plunged the Great Lakes into more than a century of bloodshed and violence. By the end of the 1600s, a series of conflicts had been raging for decades on end. Thousands of warriors fought bloody battles over control of the fur trade. They called them the Beaver Wars.

This was long before the city of Toronto was founded, long before the British conquered Québec, all the way back in the days when the French still claimed the Great Lakes for themselves. As far as they were concerned, this was New France. But barely any Europeans had ever set foot on this land: only a few early explorers, fur traders and missionaries. Where skyscrapers and condo towers now reach into the clouds, there was an ancient forest of towering oak and pine, home to moose, wolves and bears. But there were plenty of people here, too — just not French ones: the First Nations and their ancestors had been living here for thousands and thousands of years.

Beaver felt hats, 1776-1825

In the late 1600s, the Seneca had two bustling villages within the borders of today's Toronto, with dozens of longhouses surrounded by vast fields of golden maize. In the west, Teiaiagon watched over the Humber River at the spot where Baby Point is now (just a bit north of Bloor Street and Old Mill Station). In the east, Ganatsekwyagon had a commanding view over the Rouge.

They were both very important places. The Humber and the Rouge were at the southern end of a vital fur trade route: the Toronto Carrying Place trail, which gave our city its name. The rivers stretched north from Lake Ontario toward Lake Simcoe. From there, fur traders could reach the Upper Great Lakes, where the beaver population was still doing relatively well. Now that the Seneca controlled the Toronto Carrying Place, they could ship beaver
pelts south into the American colonies and sell them to their
British allies.

That pissed the French right off. They wanted those beaver pelts flowing east down the Ottawa River instead, toward their own relatively new towns of Montreal and Québec. By then, they had already spent decades fighting over the fur trade. They were on one side of the Beaver Wars, generally allied with the Wendat (the Europeans called them the Huron) and a variety of Algonquin-speaking nations, like the Odawa. On the other, the British supported the Haudenosaunee (who they called the Iroquois): a confederacy of five nations, including the Seneca.

And things were only getting worse for the French. By 1687, they still had only a few thousand settlers living in all of New France, most of them centered around Québec and Montreal. They had tried to expand their control west into the Great Lakes, establishing a trading post — Fort Frontenac — where Kingston is today. But their efforts ended in humiliating failure. They'd been forced to make peace with the Haudenosaunee and their British allies.

They were beginning to worry that they were going to lose the Beaver Wars entirely — and all of New France with them. They were scared the Haudenosaunee might overrun their settlements in Québec, and that their own First Nations allies would soon abandon them to trade with their enemies instead.

Thousands of kilometers away, in his new royal palace of Versailles, King Louis XIV — the famous Sun King, who reigned over France longer than any monarch has ever reigned over a major European nation — decided it was time for a change. The Governor of New France was fired. In his place, a new Governor was sent across the Atlantic to run things.

His remarkably long name was Jacques-René de Brisay de Denonville. He
was a career solider: a respected officer from an old, rich family with
deep ties to the throne. Upon his arrival in Canada, he would wage even
more bloody war.

~~~

Jacques-René de Brisay de Denonville

The new Governor's first move was to ignore the peace treaty. Denonville sent a hundred men north to Hudson's Bay to launch a surprise attack against British trading posts there. It was a rout. The French seized three posts run by the Hudson's Bay Company. Now, they controlled the northern trade.

Next, Denonville turned to treachery. In the summer of 1687, he proposed a peace council: a great feast with the leaders of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. Fifty chiefs came to Fort Frontenac that June to meet under a flag of truce. But it was a French trap. When the chiefs and their families arrived, Denonville's men captured them all, taking about 200 prisoners. Some were tied to posts, bound so tight they couldn't move; some were tortured. Many would be shipped across the Atlantic in chains to serve King Louis as galley slaves.

And Denonville still wasn't done. He'd brought an army with him to Fort Frontenac: 3,000 men, including professional French soldiers, militiamen from Québec, a few coureur de bois, and hundreds of First Nations allies. He led them across Lake Ontario, a sprawling fleet of hundreds of canoes and bateaux sailing toward the southern shore, where New York State is today: the heartland of the Seneca.

The Governor's plan was simple: an invasion to capture and kill as many people as he could. His ultimate goal was laid out clearly in letters sent back and forth across the Atlantic between Denonville, his boss at Versailles, and King Louis himself.

They wanted, they said, "the Establishment of the Religion, of
Commerce and the King's Power over all North America." They wanted New France to stretch all the way from the mouth of the St. Lawrence to the mouth of the Mississippi. To do it, they said, they would have to destroy the Haudenosaunee. If they failed, they feared the ruin of New France.

Denonville's boss — a government minister at Versailles — laid out the plan: "all their plantations of Indian corn will be
destroyed, their villages burnt, their women, children and old men
captured and their warriors driven into the woods where they will
be pursued and annihilated by other Indians who will have served under us
during this war."

"[His Majesty]," the minister wrote in a letter to Denonville, "expects to learn at the close of this year, the entire destruction of the greatest part of the Savages."

The army landed near where Rochester is today, at Irondequoit Bay. Then, they headed south toward Ganondagan, the biggest of the Seneca villages. Three columns of French soldiers marched through the forest with their First Nations allies. They carried swords and torches and arquebuses — an early forerunner of the musket.

Ganondagan State Historic Site today

But Denonville would have trouble finding anyone to capture or to kill. There was only a single battle fought during the entire campaign. One afternoon, as the French army was approaching Ganondagan through a narrow pass, hundreds of Seneca warriors opened fire on them from behind. There were dozens of casualties on both sides, but the attack failed. Outnumbered, the Seneca warriors retreated.

After that, they disappeared. Denonville didn't see another enemy warrior during the rest of the campaign. And every time his army arrived at a Seneca village, they found it already abandoned.

So the Governor adjusted his plan. If he couldn't kill the Seneca with swords and guns, he would starve them to death instead.

"I deemed it our best policy," he explained to Versailles, "to employ ourselves laying waste the Indian corn which was in vast abundance in the fields, rather than follow a flying enemy..."

For the next ten days, the French army was hard at work burning fields of maize. Kilometer after kilometer went up in smoke. Vast stores were destroyed, too; everything that had been saved for the winter. According to the Governor's own estimates, his men burned 1.2 million bushels of maize. Plus, they burned beans and other vegetables. A "vast quantity" of pigs was killed, too. Entire villages were burned to the ground.

With winter coming in just a few short months, Denonville's scorched earth campaign was enough to cause a famine. It wasn't just Seneca warriors who would die thanks to the French: Denonville's war was a war against civilians. Against the entire Seneca people.

"We have, assuredly," the Governor boasted, "humbled the Senecas to a considerable degree, and
seriously lowered their pride and raised the courage of their Indian
enemies."

~~~

Longhouse village

By the end of those ten days, Denonville's army was tired. It had been weeks since they left Montreal, making the long and dangerous journey up the rapids and waterfalls of the St. Lawrence River toward Lake Ontario. They'd marched through the woods for days on end, weighed down by their supplies, plagued by mosquitoes. Now, they were getting sick too. "It is full 30 years that I have had
the honour to serve," the Governor wrote to Versailles, "but I assure you, my
lord, that I have seen nothing that comes near this in labour and
fatigue."

Meanwhile, some of his First Nations allies were already leaving. There were tensions. Denonville had been badmouthing them in his reports for their
"barbarities" and "cruelties" (without even the slightest hint of irony). Some of them were from Haudenosaunee nations themselves — having allied with the French after converting to Christianity — and many seemed to have reservations about the scorched earth campaign. When Denonville asked them to burn the Seneca maize, they'd simply refused.

The Governor decided it was finally time to head home.

He took the long way around. First, the army stopped at Niagara. There, they built a new French fort on the spot where Niagara-on-the-Lake is today. Fort Denonville would give the French and their First Nations allies a base of operations to launch future attacks against the Seneca.

Then, they followed the shoreline as it wrapped all the way around the lake — passing future sites of cities like St. Catharines, Hamilton and Oakville — which brought them, eventually, to the place where Toronto now stands.

It's hard to tell from Denonville's reports exactly where they stopped each night. But most historians seem to think the army spent two nights within the borders of today's Toronto: the first near the mouth of the Humber River; the second near the mouth of the Rouge.

In his dispatches, the Governor doesn't mention anything about the inhabitants of Teiaiagon or Ganatsekwyagon, the Seneca villages on those rivers. Some historians have suggested that Denonville's army must have destroyed them, too. But it's also entirely possible that the Seneca had voluntarily abandoned them years earlier. Communities usually moved to a new location every 10 to 15 years or so.

Pretty much all the information we have comes from the entry Denonville made in his diary that day — the day we think he woke up at the Humber and travelled to the Rouge. It's not much, but it's one of the very earliest written accounts of the place where Toronto now stands:

The mouth of the Rouge River today

"The storm of wind and rain,
prevented us from leaving in the morning but at noon, the weather
clearing up, we advanced 7 or 8 leagues and encamped at a place to which I
had sent forward our Christian Indians from below. We found them with
two hundred deer they had killed, a good share of which they gave to our
army, that thus profited by this fortunate chase."

The next morning, the army continued east toward Montreal.

Denonville's campaign had succeeded in bringing death to the shores of Lake Ontario, but his greater goals would fail. The Seneca suffered terribly that winter, but the nation was far from destroyed. And the Haudenosaunee would fight back. The Five Nations of the Confederacy launched their own campaigns deep into the heart of New France. They raided French settlements and destroyed farms. Two years after Denonville's army slept on the banks of the Rouge, Mohawk warriors would travel all the way to the island of Montreal and attack the French settlers at Lachine, burning the town to the ground.

That same year, Denonville was replaced as Governor and returned home to France. He got a new job at Versailles: tutor to the king's kids.

Back in Canada, the wars raged on for another decade. But some leaders on both sides were working toward peace. By the end of the 1600s, the French had tracked down all of the surviving chiefs forced into slavery by Denonville's treachery. Thirteen of them were still alive. They were finally allowed to return home. Meanwhile, the Haudenosaunee were starting to worry about the growing power of their British allies. In 1701, a huge peace council was held at Montreal, with long negotiations leading to a treaty between New France and forty of the First Nations, including the Haudenosaunee. The Great Peace of Montreal became one of the defining moments in Canadian history.

As for Toronto, in the decades that followed the Great Peace, the French established their own trading posts at the southern end of the Carrying Place trail. Fort Douville was built near Teiaiagon. Fort Toronto was at the mouth of the Humber. Fort Rouillé stood on the Exhibition Grounds. By then, their allies, the Mississauga, had moved south into the area; they had villages at Ganatsekwyagon and near Teiaiagon, too.

But the days of peace wouldn't last: there would be even bigger wars in the 1700s. The British eventually invaded New France, winning the Battle of the Plains of Abraham and conquering all of French Canada. The last of the French forts at Toronto — Fort Rouillé — was burned as their troops retreated.

Then it was the American Revolution. The British were overthrown in the United States and those who were still loyal to the Crown were driven from their homes. A flood of Loyalist refugees fled north. Many of them ended up on the northern shore of Lake Ontario, where the British created a new province for them. They called it Upper Canada.

The new province would need a new capital. It would be built on a sheltered harbour between the Humber and the Rouge: at the end of the ancient fur trade route where the First Nations and their ancestors had been living — and hunting beavers — for thousands upon thousands of years. A place they called Toronto.

-----

A version of this story will appear in The Toronto Book of the DeadComing September 2017Pre-order from Amazon, Indigo, or your favourite bookseller

You can read the documents sent between Denonville, his boss and the King as part of the Documentary History of New York State, which you'll find on Google Docs here.

You can read Denonville's biography at the Dictionary of Canadian Biography here and his Wikipedia page here. The page for the Beaver Wars is here, Ganondagan is here, the Great Peace of Montreal is here, Teiaiagon is here, Ganatsekwyagon is here, Fort Rouillé is here and some of the other French forts here.

David Wencer writes about Teiaiagon for Torontoist here and the Canadian Encyclopedia has more about it here. The Kingston Whig-Standard has more about Denonville's treacherous "peace council" here. And the Counterweights blog shares a history of Toronto before the modern city was founded here.

The image of the beaver hats comes via Wikipedia, the painting on Denonville comes via the Répertoire du patrimoine culturel de Québec, Ganondagan State Historic Site comes via FingerLakes.com, the longhouse village comes via the Canadian Encyclopedia, and I took the photo of the Rouge River myself.

This post is related to dream40 The Beaver WarsJacques-René de Brisay de Denonville, 1687